Total Bravery

by Piper J. Drake

  Another option was to be someone he hadn’t been in a long time. The cold anger spread from his gut up and across his chest as he reached for the chill calm he’d been carrying just below the surface.

  He sat up and dropped his hand down over hers, squeezing her hand hard enough to cause a gasp from her. He didn’t let up the pressure until her panicked gaze met his. “I’m paying for your time. I get what I want. I like to get to know my girls. Talk to me.”

  She swallowed and looked down. “No other job. Just here.”

  He kept his voice to a very quiet growl. “Look at me.”

  She did, her eyes wide with fear now. Prey. The dull look of a person going through the motions cleared away by the immediate threat he presented.

  “Why only here?”

  She shook her head. “Not allowed.”

  “Not allowed anywhere else?” It followed if this really was a business front for human trafficking.

  Her lips formed the word. “No.”

  He’d eased the pressure on her hand but kept his fingers wrapped around her wrist. Her pulse fluttered against his fingertips.

  “What if I wanted to see you again, privately?” He had to keep his questions in line with his role as a horny customer.

  “Can find me here.” Tears began to glisten and her eyes darted to the side.

  “Only here?” He stared hard. She was holding back.

  Her words came back thready, almost completely inaudible. “Can talk to boss. He arrange special house calls.”

  He chuckled, the sound harsh to his own ears. Damn, he was a creepy bastard. “House calls, they call it?”

  She didn’t answer, only trembled.

  Terrorizing her wasn’t fun but he’d established himself as an interesting John now. Time to change direction. “I like variety. How often do they get new girls here?”

  Her mouth dropped open. Her pulse spiked. He tightened his grip in warning and then loosened up again. She whispered hurriedly, “Don’t know. Sometimes every week, sometimes a few days. I don’t count.”

  It was often, though. Very often.

  “Are all the girls from the same country as you and Gigi? Like I said, I like my choice from different girls.”

  She nodded. “China, Thailand, Korea, Japan. Many places. Haole from Russia, too. Some local girls. Lots of choice. Boss can talk to you about any of us.”

  Her English got better as she went through the options. Hell, she got asked this question enough to have more practice answering. Nausea rolled through his gut.

  “You have any new girls come in this week? White girls.” Mali had said at least one of her fellow researchers was close to her age and Caucasian.

  Kim shook her head again. “Maybe soon. A few here now. I can get for you, maybe.”

  He gave her a slow, cruel smile. “No need. I’m happy with you for tonight.”

  Good thing there was no mirror in this little enclosure. If he saw himself, he’d probably destroy the reflection right about now. This woman was living a nightmare being near him.

  She licked her lips. “You want me now?”

  He released her wrist. “I want a massage, a real one. I want to know how good you are with your hands before I trust you for anything else. You massage only. Then after, we’ll talk about what I want next.”

  She nodded hurriedly, obvious relief in her expression.

  Satisfied, he sat back. His foot wash turned into a foot massage. As she worked, he listened, hard. No footsteps. They might as well have been alone. Raul wondered if Zu was employing the same tactics. It didn’t matter so long as they got the intel they wanted. They’d compare notes later to look for the truth. Raul thought Kim had been honest, though. She had the look of someone who understood a lie could mean her life.

  Raul watched her as she worked. Mali could’ve ended up like this. No one deserved to be trapped into this.

  Chapter Eighteen

  If you keep pacing, the dogs are going to sleep hard tonight.”

  Mali stopped in her tracks and turned to glare at her older sister. Arin met her with a steady gaze of her own, as unfazed as ever. Fine. Arin might’ve had experience waiting for team members to come back from a…thing, whatever this was. But since Mali had woken up an hour earlier, she hadn’t known what to do with herself.

  Now that she’d stopped, Taz paused by her feet and lay down with a sigh. He’d been following her the length of the office hallway and back for the better part of the hour. She wasn’t sure if he was anxious too or just supposed to be following her while Raul was away. The dog had displayed a lot more complexity than she’d ever noticed in other canines. It could be a little bit of both.

  Arin sat relaxed on the couch in the reception corner. Her King rested easy beside her with his head between his paws. Zu’s Buck was lying by the entrance, keeping watch for intruders or waiting for Zu or both.

  “How can you be calm when we don’t know what’s happening?” Mali flinched at the sound of her own voice. Her tone had come out strained, sharper than she intended.

  Arin’s initial response was to raise her eyebrow at Mali. Her sister didn’t glare, but she had an unsettling stare. Rather than look away and drop the subject, Mali stayed where she was and waited. She couldn’t quite meet Arin stare for stare, but she wanted an answer.

  “Pua is monitoring the police and emergency channels.” Arin didn’t sound angry or irritated. To be fair, Mali wasn’t sure why she had braced herself for it. If anything, Mali wrestled with her own churning frustration as Arin seemed unruffled by the waiting. “We’ll know if there’s any disturbance on the streets. This team wasn’t designed for local work. We don’t have a van with equipment to maintain visual surveillance. The monitoring will be good enough to let us know if they need us. If we don’t hear anything, Zu and Raul have maintained their cover.”

  As she spoke, Arin reached over the arm of the couch and rested her hand on a backpack tucked away unobtrusively.

  “What’s in there?” Mali hadn’t noticed the backpack at all until Arin brought her attention to it. It seemed compact and durable, with no obvious branding.

  Arin shrugged. “They went in unarmed. This has enough for me and for them. If we hear there’s an issue on the police or emergency frequencies, I’ll head out and meet up with them. Downtown isn’t far, and we have a predetermined meet-up spot. They’ll make their way to it, and I’ll be there with enough firearms to deal with any pursuers.”

  They’d gone in unarmed. It hadn’t seemed so serious to Mali when she’d first thought about it. After all, they were going to a massage parlor so they’d be taking clothes off. Hard to hide a weapon when you were stripping down. But the idea of Arin taking firearms to them, of possible pursuit, was frightening.

  She should’ve thought about it right away. She might have. But Mali was good at focusing on the minutiae. It was what she had experience with and where she might be able to contribute constructively. Here, in these situations, this was all Arin’s world.

  Mali shifted her weight from one foot to the other, uncomfortable with her self-examination. She could and should do it more. She could do it a little at a time and find her way through the chaos inside her head. Instead, she looked at Arin. “I didn’t really ask when we met up for dinner. I never ask. What do you do?”

  Surprise flashed in Arin’s eyes. “Me specifically, or this team?”

  “Both.” Mali paused. “I’m curious about the team, but I want to understand your role in it, too.”

  Arin leaned forward and braced her elbows on her knees. “Okay. The Search and Protect is a private contract organization. We are deployed to locations to search for people and things.”

  Mali waited but Arin didn’t continue. “That seems too simple.”

  A ghost of a smile hovered around Arin’s lips, but her overall expression had gone neutral. “Everything can seem simple. The closer you look, the more complicated it gets.”

  There was a warning there, and a few days a
go Mali would’ve backed off. She’d have decided she didn’t want to know. Funny how a person could change after multiple life-threatening scares. “I’d like to understand in more detail.”

  Arin shrugged. “We’re contracted to find VIPs, high-value targets. Sometimes they’re political figures or their family. Sometimes they’re very wealthy people. Other times they aren’t either but what they do or what they know is of extreme value to various interested parties. Almost always, these are people of influence. It’s almost never about ransom.”

  This was starting to sound like a television show or action movie. But Mali had seen for herself what they did, had bullets hit sand right next to her, and had every one of them surround Mali to protect her. Maybe in six months or a year she could play back the memories like they were an episode in some action drama or police procedural show. The memory of almost dying was too fresh right now.

  Arin was watching her closely, and beside her sister, King had risen to a sitting position. He was watching her, too. “We specialize in finding those people, fast, and when we find them, we extract them quietly. Our dogs help us search for them, track them down in a lot of different environments. We go in, we get out. If we do our job right, minimal people even know we were there until they find their kidnapped victim gone.”

  “And if something goes wrong?” Mali asked.

  Even the hint of a smile left Arin’s face. There was nothing but a neutral, eerily pleasant mask. “We have the skill sets to force our way out to safety.”

  Goose bumps rose up on Mali’s arms, and she rubbed her forearms to dispel the sensation. “You and Raul and Zu.”

  “And King, and Taz, and Buck,” Arin added.

  Mali glanced down at Taz. “These dogs aren’t search-and-rescue dogs?”

  “Most dogs out there can be trained to varying degrees. How much depends on the dog.” Arin placed a hand on King’s back, at his shoulders. “Basic obedience is easy for most dogs with the right incentive. Dogs suited for service have high intelligence and a lot of specific traits trainers look for to learn other desired behaviors. Search-and-rescue dogs learn to signal when they detect certain scents. The training gets more specific based on whether the dog shows the knack for trailing or detecting scent on the air.”

  Mali nodded. Her sister was dropping her guard as she spoke about the dogs. Her tone had warmed, too. A pang of recognition hit Mali in the chest as she recognized the happiness her sister’s dog brought her. Mali was happy for her.

  “I could go on for a while about scent and search dogs.” Arin seemed to have realized she was going on about it. “What matters is that our dogs are more. They each have a specialization in the way they can search and what kinds of terrain they have experience searching in. We go with them, and the path forward can have some resistance. So our combat training comes into play and our dogs have similar training to work with us and defend us.”

  To defend, sometimes the dogs had to attack. Mali might duck away from the severity of the situation most times, but the obvious was right here with the dogs. She looked at Taz sitting beside her. He was a big dog, and maybe if she’d met him on his own, she’d have been unsure—even afraid—of him. But she’d met him with Raul and he’d been wearing a service vest.

  Mali reached behind Taz’s ears and gave him a scratch. “Well, it’s obvious meeting any of them that they’re really smart.”

  Arin did smile, finally. “They’re rare. Not all dogs have the temperament to be working dogs. A smaller subset have the talent for scent. And an even smaller subset can be trained for multiple focuses the way these guys are.”

  Mali finished scratching and ruffled Taz’s ears. His eyes just about rolled back in his head.

  “He likes you.” Arin’s statement was full of warmth.

  Mali huffed out a laugh. “You were always better with dogs, though.”

  “You are better with people,” Arin answered immediately.

  Mali blinked. She hadn’t ever thought she was better at anything when compared with her sister. She’d always thought of them as drastically different. Finding similarities had filled her with frustration. Comparing and contrasting hadn’t seemed right. But there was no bitterness or negativity in what Arin said. It was a simple matter of fact.

  Arin continued. “You’re sensitive to the emotional temperature around you. If you don’t feel safe, there is a creep somewhere. If you are comfortable, generally the people around you are good people. You’re incredibly accurate, and you don’t even have to think about it. You probably shouldn’t think about it. Thinking too hard can make you second-guess. You should trust your gut. I’ve trusted your instincts for a long time.”

  Tears welled up hot in Mali’s eyes. Arin had trusted her, looked to her for her reaction to the world. It was like coming to her for advice, but not in any way Mali had ever recognized. “I didn’t realize.”

  “Now you do.” Arin cleared her throat, and this time, she was the one to look away. “I’m not good with people. I do things. I make things happen. I eliminate problems. It bothers you.”

  So much truth being laid bare.

  Mali put words to what they both already knew she thought. “You’re violent.”

  Arin’s gaze met hers, steady and calm. “Yes.”

  And there it was. Her big sister became a cold stranger again. Cut off from the warmth and humanity that made people normal. This time Mali didn’t try to brush away the goose bumps. Instead, she wrapped her arms around herself.

  But Arin wasn’t finished. “You have as much potential to hurt people.”

  Shock splashed through Mali’s veins. “Me? No. How?”

  “Raul is new to the island, newer than the rest of us.” Arin sat up and returned to leaning back on the couch. “He’s still getting used to this place. The transient nature of a tourist area hasn’t been impressed upon him yet. You being transient hasn’t sunk in for him yet.”

  Mali sucked in a breath. She hadn’t thought about it either.

  Arin nodded. “This thing between you two, you do yourselves harm if you pretend it’s not more than a fling. What’s between you is a lot deeper than that.”

  Mali shied away from thinking too hard about it. She closed her eyes and shook her head. “It’s been a couple of days. That’s not enough time to develop a relationship. He has his job. I’ll go back to my research. We’ll see each other through this, and that’ll be a good thing through this experience. But we’re not anything to each other.”

  They couldn’t hurt each other.

  When she opened her eyes, Arin wasn’t looking at her anymore. Raul and Zu stood in the doorway to the office, and Raul was staring at her.

  * * *

  Not true.

  Raul stepped inside so Zu could come in and greet Buck. Taz crossed the space between Mali and Raul, coming around to Raul’s left and leaning his shoulder hard into Raul’s hip.

  Mali remained rooted in place, staring at him with wide eyes.

  Well, part of what she said wasn’t true. He viewed her as something to him. But no one had to know. In fact, in his line of work, it was better that way.

  He glanced at Arin.

  She actually looked sad. “We were mid-conversation. This wasn’t where I was going with the discussion.”

  Zu surveyed the room. “It’s going to have to wait. We have intel, and we need to plan next steps.”

  Raul followed Zu down the hallway, pausing as he came even with Mali. He looked into her eyes and saw her quietly panicking. He couldn’t help it; he reached out and cupped her face briefly. “We can talk later. Let’s concentrate on this for now.”

  There’d been a lot of different things vying for his attention recently, and he couldn’t remember the last time he’d had to make so many choices on what to address first. It had to be the same way for Mali, possibly even more confusing. She was going to feel guilty for what she’d said. He didn’t want to think about it until he’d had time to absorb how she felt about this t
hing between them on his own.

  It hurt. Shit, it hurt. But this was not the time to deal with it.

  Zu rapped his knuckles on Pua’s door. There was a rustle, and Pua popped out of her office faster than a bunny let out of a top hat. “Boss! Glad to see you back in one piece.”

  Zu grunted, all business and no time for chatter. “We’re going to need the latest satellite pictures you can get a hold of for the private farms and estates in the middle of the island.”

  Before Raul could follow Zu, Mali touched Raul’s elbow. He stopped, cursed inwardly, and turned to face her.

  Yup. Regret and sorrow were written all over her face. He hadn’t wanted to see it.

  “What?” Damn. The word came out rough, too.

  She winced. “What I said…”

  It mattered. He wasn’t going to ignore it or pretend he hadn’t heard her, but he hadn’t told her his feelings yet. Not really. “Look. I don’t do one-night stands. I genuinely like you. It might not be logical, but not everything that happens in this world has a logical reason behind it.”

  She didn’t reply, only stared at him.

  He shook his head. “Don’t try to resolve this now. Don’t feel bad over me. I’m not worth the time when there’s a higher priority for all of us here.”

  “You are—”

  “No. I’m not.” He cut her off, his tone harsh. “You ever wonder what I did in the military? I committed heinous acts. I can’t go to sleep at night without seeing the terrified faces of people, some children, I helped hunt down for questioning. For those people, I was the bogeyman. It was my job to scare people and I did it well.” He closed his eyes and remembered the frightened expression on Kim’s face, the woman from the massage parlor. He opened his eyes and looked sadly at Mali. “I came here to start doing some kind of good, but I know there’s no redemption for me. Stop thinking of me as a good person.”

  Mali started to step back from him and stopped herself. She didn’t seem to know what to say.

  He held his breath for a count of ten and let it out slow. “It’s okay. Don’t fret. I enjoyed us, but I’m not going to continue if you don’t want to, and I’m not going to make it hard on you either. We’re going to help your friends. And then you’re going to go your own way.”